New EO from Obama to push diversity in the federal workforce

posted at 6:10 pm on August 18, 2011 by Tina Korbe

The president won’t present a jobs plan until September (as Ed says, he’ll be working on that while on “vacation” in Martha’s Vineyard), but he today issued an executive order to tackle another top national priority: increasing diversity in the federal workforce.

Like all EOs, the order out-and-out accomplishes little: It merely establishes a “coordinated government-wide initiative to promote diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce.”

The details of the initiative have yet to be worked out. Instead of creating a new administrative body, as did Obama’s 2009 executive order on veterans’ employment, the diversity initiative will lean on a council of deputy agency chiefs, along with the Office of Personnel Management, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

That group will be responsible for creating a government-wide plan within 90 days. According to the order, after the government-wide plan is released, each agency must present its own specific plan for diversity within 120 days. The plans must reflect initiatives on a number of issues, including recruitment, training and promotion.

In other words, the EO demands plans — first a government-wide plan from the council of deputy agency chiefs, then agency-specific plans. Funny how Obama would like to see ideas to increase diversity on paper, but seems to think a speech will suffice for ideas to address the debt, deficit and job creation.

This order represents the highest-profile response to concerns about a lack of diversity in the federal workforce — and, as such, tells us something about Obama’s priorities at the moment. In fact, that seems to be the entire point of the order — to demonstrate that Obama has not forgotten his commitment to this all-important cause (sarcmark) (interesting, given the Congressional Black Caucus’ disappointment with the president’s lack of attention to the fact that unemployment has hit some minorities particularly hard). John Berry, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, said the order ensures efforts to increase diversity won’t fall by the wayside.

The emphasis on diversity-for-diversity’s-sake has always perplexed me. The EO repeatedly states the new diversity-improvement plans must be “consistent with merit-based principles,” but a system to explicitly increase diversity cannot possibly be a system to reward merit and only merit, unless it’s true that various markers of diversity add to an individual’s ability to perform a given job well. Based on the executive order, the president seems to think this.

“Our Nation derives strength from the diversity of its population and from its commitment to equal opportunity for all. We are at our best when we draw on the talents of all parts of our society, and our greatest accomplishments are achieved when diverse perspectives are brought to bear to overcome our greatest challenges,” the executive order states. “To realize more fully the goal of using the talents of all segments of society, the Federal Government must continue to challenge itself to enhance its ability to recruit, hire, promote, and retain a more diverse workforce.”

Certainly, I can think of any number of tasks that would be best tackled with a team made up of people from all different backgrounds — but I can also think of tasks in which it doesn’t matter whether the person who performs it hails from one part of the country or another, comes from one race or another, operates from one political ideology or another, etc., etc., etc. Mail delivery, for example, requires only that the carrier be efficient.

This order is extraneous and distracting from what should be the government’s role: providing certain basic services that cannot otherwise be provided (like national defense!) as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Blowback

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The emphasis on diversity-for-diversity’s-sake has always perplexed me

it’s perplexing because diversity isn’t what is going on. It’s promoting of otherwise unqualified individuals for the sake of saying that the organization is now diverse, to the detriment of the mission. When you promote on diversity, you fail to promote on competence. If you promote on competence, you just may achieve diversity through that, if not, oh well.

We just saw the pirate exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science about the Whydah shipwreck. My son remarked to me how amazing it was that the first really democratic and color-blind society was that of the pirates. They didn’t care what color your skin was or what your status was (rich, poor, slave, free, etc.), they only cared about how well you did your job on the ship. They also shared all of the booty equally, going so far as to chop up valuable jewelry in order to share. If you did your job, you got your share. If you didn’t do your share, you were beaten or thrown overboard.

Are there any white males that work for the govt now? Jeez, if there is one area of the workforce that is “diverse” it’s the govt. Try finding one white male working in any of the federal bureaucracy (other than military).

We are at our best when we draw on the talents of all parts of our society, and our greatest accomplishments are achieved when diverse perspectives are brought to bear to overcome our greatest challenges,”

Really Barry? We certainly can’t prove that by you, can we? You were our first “diversity hire” in the office of the president, and you’ve been a disaster that this nation will be lucky to survive.

I think I’m going to have to take a break from Hot Air for awhile. Since it’s one of my 2 main sources of political coverage, and it’s so chock-full of enraging stuff lately(with no ameliorating presentation to help keep it at arm’s length), I truly feel that it’s detrimental to my health.

I was raised to be a Lib in a far-Left ‘burb of Chicago. Like most other kids in this country we were taught in school about MLK and to judge a person on the “content of their character,” not the color of their skin.

Yet it really bothered me that the Left would continuously do the exact opposite. Judging by their actions, the Left primarily judge people by the color of their skin, not their character. To the Left, if you have a certain skin color you are supposed to act and think a certain way. All of the racialists, civil-rights industry types, and ethnocentric separatist/grievance groups are all on the Left.

Once I understood all this, and it took many years, I started investigating what conservatives were all about on my own. Then I learned that I have been a conservative my whole life, I just didn’t know it. I choose to judge people by the content of their character, and I actually care about helping the poor and less fortunate by advocating for what actually works in real life.

Believing that you’re better than others
Fantasizing about power, success and attractiveness
Exaggerating your achievements or talents
Expecting constant praise and admiration
Believing that you’re special and acting accordingly
Failing to recognize other people’s emotions and feelings
Expecting others to go along with your ideas and plans
Taking advantage of others
Expressing disdain for those you feel are inferior
Being jealous of others
Believing that others are jealous of you
Trouble keeping healthy relationships
Setting unrealistic goals
Being easily hurt and rejected
Having a fragile self-esteem
Appearing as tough-minded or unemotional

Are there any white males that work for the govt now?
angryed on August 18, 2011 at 6:20 PM

Come to my post office and you’d be asking are there any Americans who speak English that work for the government. It’s rare you even see a black worker there. They’re all Indians and Vietnamese who you can’t even understand. If I had wanted to live in India or Laos I would have moved there. No wonder everyone moves to Austin. It’s still a bastion of non-diversity.

When you hear the word “diversity” from the government, as when you hear the phrase “affirmative action” think anti-white racial discrimination. That’s exactly what it means and that’s all it really means and all the rest, like “merit-based principles”, is just for tonal effects. It’s a sort of dark pigmentation reward.

What’s odd is that blacks for decades have been significantly overrepresented in the governmental work forces. Government agencies are the single largest employer of black men and the second most common employer of black women, especially in places like the EEOC, possibly the biggest racial discriminator (against whites) of all.

This EO id just your usual unconstitutional anti-white discrimination to keep 95% of the black vote, made possible, as always, by sappy bleeding heart white liberals (especially federal judges), who, like the poor, will always be with us.

when diverse perspectives are brought to bear to overcome our greatest challenges,”

When your network server goes down the only thing important is can the tech get it back on line. Their skin color and gender aren’t relevant. Get a clue very little government work requires diverse perspectives to accomplish.

This is soo stupid on so many levels it is hard to know where to start. So, let’s start at the top. EVERY government department ALREADY has minority hiring policies. These policies were implemented DECADES ago. These policies extend to government contracts and have been included in those contracts for decades.

This is notably coming from a guy who thinks that ATMs are the devil’s work and should be shut down to increase employment in banks. He is all about improving efficiency and effectiveness and this EO is just the latest evidence of that. What could go wrong?

Also makes you wonder if he read about the SCOTUS ruling in the New Haven firefighters’ anti-discrimination lawsuit? Him being a Constitutional law expert and all.

1/3rd of all blacks who have jobs are employed by government. Blacks tend to be much less educated and much more criminal than whites, so how much more diversity can we afford? There is a reason for an incompetent gov’t, incompetent people in it.

And just a few years ago I remember that the stats came out that showed the federal workforce represented very well the percentage of minorities within the population as a whole… this is only attempt to put a fix in, not actually fix anything.

Our Nation derives strength from the diversity of its population and from its commitment to equal opportunity for all.

These are mutually exclusive goals. You can’t have a program to promote diversity without having unequal opportunity, i.e. discriminating against individuals who are members of a less-favored group or discriminating for favored members. Read Thomas Sowell’s book on affirmative action around the world for real-life cases of economic and social disasters policies like these lead to, all without doing a thing to solve the “problem” of unequal racial and cultural distribution.

Really? We need more diversity? According to the GOV’s own numbers, Blacks are over represented while Hispanics are underrepresented. What is really crazy is that some departments and offices are 60% minority!